[Haskell-cafe] Haskell on Pocket PC?

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi,

If I was doing a Haskell port to PPC Windows Mobile, I'd start with
Yhc. If you port a small, portably written runtime (Yhi) in C, then
you get everything else for free.

There was some talk of a palm port of Yhi, and the only issues that
came up were:

* GMP is a dependancy, so you'll need to get GMP on Windows mobile.

* Palm doesn't have a real file system, this isn't true on Windows Mobile.

Yhc also compiles natively with Visual Studio, which should make this
even easier for you.


> 1) Haskell learning tool, so small code snipets could be entered and
> run directly on hand-held (REPL).
See Yhe, which does this (its not finished yet, but finishing it
shouldn't be much work)

> 2) Running on PPC Haskell applications cross-compiled on host PC.
Yhc has portable bytecode, hence any program is already cross-compiled
to every platform.

> b) Porting/compiling to .NET CLR?
Yhc can already compile to .NET CLR if that helps.

> c) Porting/compiling source code
Yhc is pure Haskell, and at some point will be able to be run by Yhc,
then you'll have all these things for free.

> 4) And finally, do any projects already exist in this area?

There have been various projects to port nhc and then Yhc to PalmOS,
which is probably a harder challenge than Windows Mobile. I used an
older version of Windows CE and the porting required for Visual Studio
projects was minimal.

If you need any Yhc specific help with the changes, feel free to email
the Yhc mailing list (yhc -at- haskell.org) view the documentation
(http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yhc), or ask on the Haskell IRC
(I'm ndm).

Thanks

Neil